Christmas 2023 - B Finding God where we don't expect him

 Friends

Peace be with you.

We have probably all had an experience of being somewhere and seeing someone we didn’t expect to be there. At Ed Gibbs funeral this past week, I walked down the steps of the rectory and saw a familiar face of a parishioner whose name I couldn’t quite place. I smiled and he smiled back and I walked toward the church to get things set up. After two steps it clicked that the reason I couldn’t quite place him was because he wasn’t a parishioner from St. Patrick’s but from Bellevue, my previous assignment. I turned around and suddenly his name popped in my head when I knew the right context. I taught his daughter at Marquette High School, for goodness sake, and it was great to catch up with John and Angie for a while. Considering the kindnesses I received in my previous assignment from several members of the Gibbs’ family, it should have clicked before then that Bellevue people would be here. 

I’m guessing many of you have never heard the gospel I/Deacon Dan read for tonight/today’s Mass. Most of the time we think about the birth of Jesus, we think of passages from the Gospel of Luke. That’s the Gospel that tells the story more from the viewpoint of Mary. It tells us that the birth took place in Bethlehem because of a census and that Jesus was born in a manger and that angels appeared to shepherds in the fields. We may also think about details from the Gospel of Matthew, which tells the story more from the viewpoint of Joseph. It’s in that Gospel that we find out about the Magi visiting Jesus and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. I decided to focus on the Gospel of John, which has a decidedly different, more cosmic perspective. Rather than starting with Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, as the Gospel of Mark does, or with Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, as the Gospels of Matthew and Luke do; the Gospel of John begins from the creation of the world. It echoes the story of creation in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. “In the beginning” St. John says “was the word”. What is the word? In Genesis, God used words to create the universe . God said “Let there be light”. In the mind of the Gospel writer, Jesus was the word God the Father used to create the world. Yet, he is also careful to say he was with God and was God, meaning he is both distinct from the Father and the second person of the Holy Trinity. St. John continues by saying that nothing came to be without the Word and what came to be was life. So Jesus was not only the Word that started creation, he continued with the Father to make animals and humans and was even present at the fall when the light he bestowed got contrasted with the darkness of sin. Notice, however, the emphasis that St. John puts on the fact that, despite the presence of darkness, the darkness does not overcome Christ’s light. 

Instead, the Word, which was part creation, decided to enter into the very creation he made. St. John says not only that this wasn’t John the Baptist, which was apparently one of the beliefs of the followers of St. John the Baptist, but that St. John the Baptist himself pointed this out. In one of the most confusing sentences in Sacred Scripture, St. John the Evangelist quotes St. John the Baptist as saying, “The one who is coming after me ranks ahead of me because he existed before me.’” Sounds more like a riddle than the ultimate statement of humility that it really is. What St. John the Baptist ultimately pointed out was that, with his successor, something new would happen for the entire world, something that was essential to salvation: namely the grace that makes us, who accept Jesus into our hearts and didn’t reject him or ignore him at his coming, sons and daughters of God. 

St. John’s Gospel is going to explain what it means to be sons and daughters of God but the surprising thing that we celebrate today is how it came about. For the Jewish people, salvation comes from obedience to the laws passed down to them from Moses in the first five books of the Bible and in the interpretation of those laws that have been made throughout the centuries. For Christians, because we accept Jesus into our hearts, we replace any graces that come from obedience to the law with the grace of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled that law. The shocking thing is this all happens here on earth. One would think that, to engage in spiritually beneficial things, we need get pulled out of this darkened earth into a kind of partially lit middle ground between heaven and earth because this world is so corrupt. That’s why St. John emphasized that, despite the darkness of sin in this world, Christ’s light defeats the power of darkness. Jesus Christ, the second person of the trinity, the word through whom creation was made, the light of the world, etc. etc. etc. entered into this world as a baby and, in a sense, showed us how to become sons and daughters of God just as he is the Son of God. 

I think, as a church, we’re pretty good about talking about the dangers of sin and making sure we do things like examining our conscience and approaching the sacrament of reconciliation at least once a year and whenever we’re conscious of committing a mortal sin. However, I don’t think we always emphasize enough that, if we are to be sons and daughters of God, the point of Christian living shouldn’t just be to avoid sin and confess it when we do. That’s like opening a restaurant and spending all your time making sure you don’t violate the health code or opening a bank and spending all your time making sure the security system is working. While we all want restaurants that don’t violate the health code and banks that keep our money safe, if that same restaurant never makes any food because they’re so fixated on the health code or that bank never takes any deposits because all the employees do is stare at the security system, we’re probably not going to use them. As Christians, we need to pray in a way that doesn’t just ask Jesus how disappointing we are to him, but how does Jesus live and how might we live that way too. I was recently reading a book by the Jesuit theologian Father Robert Spitzer who talked about the importance of what he called consciousness examen. This is not the examination of conscience, which we should do before we celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation, but a way of giving thanks to God for what he has done and praying with the beatitudes to move our hearts to be more like Jesus’ heart. It starts by being grateful for the small and big gifts that God has given us but then moves us to focus on asking God to change our hearts slowly to be more like his by using one of the beatitudes. The point of the second part, asking Jesus to make our hearts like his, isn’t to beat ourselves up for not being like Jesus but something closer to practicing for sports or music, with the way we love God and neighbor. For example, we may have a coworker or friend or family member that we don’t know how to love. In fact, we may find them frustrating to deal with and try to avoid them. We may use our time in prayer to ask Jesus to reveal to us how he would deal with that person. We may ask Jesus how he would act toward someone who says or does what that person says or does and then find Jesus challenging us to be meek and humble of heart like him, for instance, or to challenge that person lovingly like he would to be grateful for the gifts they have. 

We may be surprised to find Jesus in more places throughout our day, in more of the faces we see, and the voices we hear.